Week in review: April 8

Posted by Adrian Holovaty on April 8, 2007

Django's version 0.96 just landed, but we're already hard at work on the next version. Here's a rundown of some of the bigger improvements we've made to the Django development version in the past week:

As of changeset 4901, we've added the ability to name URL patterns. This is a great help with reverse URL matching. See the new docs.

Have you seen django.contrib.localflavor yet? An example of our "batteries included" philosophy, it's a collection of functions and data structures that are useful for locale-specific applications. The biggest part of localflavor at this point are django.newforms-style Field objects that validate an assortment of country-specific data. For example, we've got validators for U.S. Social Security numbers, phone numbers, states and ZIP codes; post codes in Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, and the U.K; and government identity numbers for a number of countries. Plus, we've got more coming. If you can think of (and, better yet, implement) some locale-specific logic that would be useful to a number of people and localflavor doesn't yet handle, please contribute!

Work progresses on the newforms-admin branch, which aims to integrate Django's admin site with the newforms library. Along the way, we're taking the opportunity to add extra customization hooks to the admin site. Much of the implementation is done already, and it's now possible, using the branch, to run multiple instances of the Django admin site, with different configuration, in the same Django project. This is exciting stuff; see the status section of the wiki page for some examples of what's changed.

We created a unicode branch this week. Malcolm Tredinnick will be taking the lead on making all of Django's internals fully Unicode-aware, once and for all. See the branch wiki page for more info.